During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.

…There is a reverse side, of course, to the “ticking bomb” and torture: pain and ill-treatment, by creating an unbearable pressure on the detainee to say something, anything, to make the pain stop, increase the likelihood that he will fabricate stories, and waste time, or worse. At least some of the intelligence that came of the “alternative set of procedures,” like Zubaydah’s supposed “information” about attacks on shopping malls and banks, seems to have led the US government to issue what turned out to be baseless warnings to Americans. Khaled Shaik Mohammed asserted this directly in his interviews with the ICRC. “During the harshest period of my interrogation,” he said,

I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop…. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent…wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US.

For all the talk of ticking bombs, very rarely, if ever, have officials been able to point to information gained by interrogating prisoners with “enhanced techniques” that enabled them to prevent an attack that had reached its “operational stage” (that is, had gone beyond reconnoitering and planning). Still, widespread perception that such techniques have prevented attacks, actively encouraged by the President and other officials, has been politically essential in letting the administration carry on with these policies after they had largely become public. Polls tend to show that a majority of Americans are willing to support torture only when they are assured that it will “thwart a terrorist attack.” Because of the political persuasiveness of such scenarios it is vital that a future inquiry truly investigate claims that attacks have been prevented.

Nonetheless, Cheney continues his media appearances, insisting “Obama endangers the nation” because torture is necessary, and has produced useful information, especially from KSM. A Sunday WashingtonTimes piece quotes Cheney:

“…the country is more vulnerable to a potential terrorist attack since the Obama administration took power.

Mr. Cheney said that administration’s dismantling of many of the policies and protections instituted by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — including the planned closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba and halting controversial prisoner interrogation techniques — have made the country more vulnerable to future attacks.

“That’s my belief,” Mr. Cheney said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I think to the extent that those [Bush-era] policies were responsible for saving lives, that the administration is now trying to cancel those policies … means in the future we’re not going to have the same safeguards we’ve had for the last eight years.”

The former vice president defended controversial interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, saying that it had been an effective tool in extracting useful information from suspected terrorists such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of helping carry out the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks Washington and New York.

“He did not cooperate fully in terms of interrogations until after waterboarding,” Mr. Cheney said. “Once we went through that process, he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al Qaida.”

And in a related story, posted separately, we learn that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi has died, allegedly of suicide, in a Libyan prison, following 7.5 years in captivity, during which he was also tortured (at a black site in Egypt). Al-Libi was the source of the story that “Saddam Hussein had been involved in training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

In Egypt, he came up with the false allegation about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used by President Bush in a speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, just days before Congress voted on a resolution authorizing the President to go to war against Iraq…

Al-Libi recanted his story in February 2004, when he was returned to the CIA”s custody, and explained, as Newsweek described it, that he told his debriefers that “he initially told his interrogators that he “knew nothing” about ties between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden and he “had difficulty even coming up with a story” about a relationship between the two.” The Newsweek report explained that “his answers displeased his interrogators — who then apparently subjected him to the mock burial. As al-Libi recounted, he was stuffed into a box less than 20 inches high. When the box was opened 17 hours later, al-Libi said he was given one final opportunity to “tell the truth.” He was knocked to the floor and “punched for 15 minutes.” It was only then that, al-Libi said, he made up the story about Iraqi weapons training.“

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